The unhappinness of elements of the Irish Government over the meeting with de Rossa was one thing; a discontented UUP parliamentary caucus was quite another. It was not so much the substance of such exercises in free-thinking which vexed them: after all, as Trimble never tired of pointing out, Martin Smyth had been the first MP to declare that Unionists might have to talk to Sinn Fein, subject to a surrender of weapons.21 What really annoyed them was the manner in which the meeting took place. Trimble had met with de Rossa before he had met with his colleagues. Indeed, he did not meet the Westminster MPs for weeks afterwards – either collectively or one-on-one. Partly, it was his own personality. It was not his style to dabble in the little touches in man-management at which Molyneaux excelled, such as solicitous inquiries after wives and children. Indeed, Trimble says that he knew he had serious problems with his fellow MPs, but that it did not occur to him to meet with them until Parliament resumed in the following month. Ken Maginnis – who became one of Trimble’s strongest supporters – still thinks it was a cardinal error of judgment which has damaged him to this day.22 Trimble, though, believes that levels of resentment were such that he doubts it would have made very much difference.23 Certainly, in the case of William Ross, the gulf between the two men was probably so enormous as to be unbridgeable. Ross, a magnificently ‘thran’ sheep farmer from the Roe Valley near Dungiven, finished his elementary education at the age of fourteen and is very much out of the ‘School of Life’ Brigade; he would soon emerge as Trimble’s most forthright critic in the Westminster team. Ross regarded Trimble as a clever butterfly who moved from one group to the next – from Vanguard to the UUP to the Union Group to the Ulster Clubs and finally on to the Ulster Society. Although no fool, Ross’s conservatism was of the heart, not of the mind. This proved to be the essence of his differences with Trimble. He felt that Trimble had no gut understanding of the malignancy of republicans because he came from the most English part of Co. Down, where there was a tiny and largely quiescent nationalist population. By contrast, Ross’s native Dungiven, which was one-third Protestant when he grew up, was now almost completely Catholic and the local IRA units were much in evidence. Talk of a balanced accommodation, Ross believed, was all very well – unless you were on the receiving end of ethnic cleansing.24
The member of the parliamentary party with whom Trimble then felt more comfortable was his closest rival for the leadership – John Taylor. The two men had an older brother – younger brother relationship since Vanguard days: Taylor, first elected to Stormont in 1965, was then the longest-serving elected representative in Northern Ireland.25 But for all their compatibility, Taylor was also the only Unionist who could conceivably threaten his leadership. A role had, therefore, to be found for him. But of what kind? Trimble rang Taylor from his Lurgan office and asked to come to the latter’s home near Armagh. He knew that if Taylor had won, the older man would have appointed him as chief whip. But to have done the same for Taylor would have been beneath Taylor’s dignity. On the drive down, a solution occurred to him. He remembered that the parliamentary party was not governed by UUC rules. Harold McCusker had been elevated to the deputy leadership of the Unionist caucus in the 1982–6 Prior Assembly. Armed with this precedent, Trimble made his offer to Taylor. The Strangford MP duly accepted, though Trimble acknowledges that this action, too, inflamed some in the parliamentary party.26 But it was worth it: they could not decide Trimble’s fate, whereas Taylor, with his 333 third-round votes, easily could. Indeed, as Reg Empey recalls, ‘Trimble needed Taylor more than Taylor needed Trimble’.27
The move had been foreshadowed earlier in the month when Trimble took Taylor with him for his first meeting with John Major at No. 10: he was determined to tie him into his policy. The reluctance to go alone to see the Prime Minister was, says Trimble, a reflection of his own weakness. As a token of his esteem, Major greeted Trimble on the doorstep of No. 10 (the meeting, which began at 10:30 a.m., ran well over time, and ensured that Trimble had to run frantically across Whitehall for his 12:00 noon appointment with Tony Blair, the leader of the Opposition, at the Commons).28 The encounter at No. 10 was dominated by one subject, which in the words of Sir John Chilcot ‘lay there at the heart of the process like a coiled snake: decommissioning’.29 Trimble remembers that Major rounded on him for letting down the Government by holding too soft a position on decommissioning. If so, it was an acute reading of Trimble’s remarks at his first press conference at Glengall Street. He demanded that both the Irish and British Governments stick to their original interpretation of paragraph 10 of the Downing Street Declaration, which demanded the establishment of a commitment to exclusively peaceful methods. In subsequent interviews, Trimble appeared to harden the UUP postion by requiring the disbandment of paramilitary groupings, as well as decommissioning. But amidst this smokescreen, Trimble was sending other signals, which would have eluded most ordinary Unionist supporters. For Trimble also hinted that this commitment could be shown in a variety of different ways. The point was underlined by the interview he gave to the Belfast Telegraph the day after his election, where it was revealed that senior Ulster Unionists (that is, himself) were considering proposals for a new assembly that could help end the deadlock over decommissioning and all-party talks.30
It was an early illustration of how carefully Trimble used language. As Dick Grogan correctly observed, ‘Mr Trimble [though] is not averse to the use of nuance when it suits, and his avowed precision is a tactical weapon carefully employed only within certain closely cordoned areas where he chooses to engage and damage his enemy … but he would not, or could not, specify or even speculate on – the nature or quantity of evidence he will require in order to be satisfied that these sweeping conditions have been met.’31 Major’s annoyance was, however, understandable. The Government had sought, through decommissioning, to supply reassurance to the nine Ulster Unionists and Conservative backbenchers that Sinn Fein/IRA would not be brought into constitutional politics without proper ‘sanitisation’. The Government had, therefore, paid a price for supplying such reassurance in the shape of ‘Washington III’ – Mayhew’s demand of 7 March 1995 that the IRA start decommissioning prior to entry into all-party talks as a confidence-building measure. That led to tensions with nationalist Ireland and to some degree with the United States. And now, here was a ‘hardline’ UUP leader quietly pulling the rug from under their feet.
In the longer run, the British Government had reason to be grateful to Trimble. For he thus afforded them the space to resile